Che Guevara, survival

It is incredible how most of the immediate testimonies to the fall of Che Guevara in La Higuera, that October 1967, and the expressions coming from all latitudes in solidarity with Cuba and the pain of its people, spoke about sadness but especially, survival.

I find it incredible because I figure out that the misery of that time must have been great, the feeling of emptiness, the irreparable loss, and however certainty was unanimous: intellectuals, in the midst of their grief, clearly sensed that Che had not been killed, that there was a second birth of man for Latin America and the world.

In that sense, a phrase especially overwhelms me, that of Rodolfo Walsh when he writes: "Sooner or later someone will get the hell out of this continent. It will not be Che's memory, that now is scattered in one hundred cities. "And it is that the Commander had delivered during his life, as Lezama Lima says, "the terrible and magnificent tests of his size for transfiguration". A transfiguration and a myth that conservatives try to steal, re-write, reconfigure and sell today. To make him sterile, impossible to reach. It is the way to smash that October, a bet on forgetfulness, banalization, boredom.

And since he does not fall from a quick death, then let him die slowly in the market of ideas and reality. This is how we have seen him in T-shirts and cheap goods, movies and posters, but I want to think that much of his example remains in those who buy or watch the merchandise; which rather than a fashion is a motive, a trigger. At least it is my impression after reading these words by Rigoberta Menchú: "Like many people from my country, my first knowledge of Che was more for his image and symbolism than for his writings and his work.”And it is the same security when I look at my contemporaries, star dreamers, Quixotes, who know that immobility would be Che's real death.

Then it is not unreasonable to reiterate Cortazar's invocation in those sad, seed-like days: "I ask for the impossible thing, the most undeserved thing, what I dared to do once, when he lived: I ask that it be his voice that appears here, that it is his hand that writes these lines. I know it is absurd and it is impossible, and that's why I think he writes this with me, because no one knew better how the absurd and the impossible thing will one day be the reality of men, the future whose conquest he gave his young and wonderful life for. Then use my hand once again my brother, it has been worthless to cut off your fingers, it has been worthless to kill you and hide you with their clumsy tricks. Take, write: what is left for me to say and do, I will always say it and will do it with you by my side. Only then will it make sense to go on living ".

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In Sancti Spiritus People also Shouted ´I am Fidel´

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Cubasí.cu interviewed translator Aracelia del Valle from Escambray website on people’s reaction for the journey of the caravan carrying the remains of Commander in Chief Fidel Castro to Santiago de Cuba.